Kenneth Roy The Expert View is Wrong

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Tanned and smiling,

Mr Blair arrives

among us

Ronnie Smith

In the summer of 2003 I was sent on an exploratory business trip to Serbia that included a presentation to around 1,000 Serbian accountants at a mountain conference centre four hours’ drive from Belgrade.

     My business was the development of professional training markets and I was following a lead from a very good friend of mine who split his time between west London and the ‘old country’. The war that he and many others from the old Yugoslavia had fled was over and he was hoping to help his country develop under the leadership of the newly but precariously elected liberal government.
     In Belgrade itself the husks of the government buildings bombed by NATO in 1999 sat at strange angles, unrepaired and ready to topple into the street at any moment: testament to the county’s unwillingness to hand over Messrs Mladic and Karadic to the Hague and the subsequent drying up of international funding. The Serbs were not yet ready to forgive or co-operate with those who had betrayed them and blamed them for the violence that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia. The country was in turmoil and the old city echoed to the sound of miners protesting the government’s privatisation programme in their thousands, sitting on avenue kerbsides endlessly banging empty plastic five-litre water bottles against the tarmac. Re-joining the world would take time.
     Our route out of the city took us past the war criminal Arkan’s luxury house across the street from the stadium of his beloved Red Star Belgrade, part of a network of monuments to Balkan brutality. Half-way to the conference where I was to speak, we stopped at a roadside bar just outside my friend’s home town of Cacak. The heat on the plain was blistering and we went inside to join a group of old school friends for a drink on the shady terrace. A rough bunch on first inspection, they turned out to be just like any other group of hard-living, hard-drinking men in a pub on a hot afternoon, loudly on the edge, and after a few rounds of beer and golden Slivovice I was more or less accepted.
     ‘You know Tony Blair?’, one of them asked me through his irregular teeth in very halting English, as I took my seat on the terrace. I nodded and smiled. ‘F*** him!’. My smile stuck to my face as I considered my options if things turned nasty. I concluded that I didn’t have any, but thereafter we toasted Tony Blair at each round of drinks for two hours during which they shared their experiences of the recent NATO bombing. This included the story of the tractor factory 10km up the road that had been destroyed because it was assumed to be making tank parts for Serb regular forces. The owner was still hoping for compensation from someone, anyone. Laughing loudly, my new friends told me how they had felt shunned by NATO because Cacak had not been bombed and they had written on the roof of the town’s largest barn, ‘Hey NATO! Don’t you like us?’.
     Another round and an even louder, ‘Tony Blair’, as our glasses clinked to the toast as the boiling air shimmered outside.
     And so to the American-Romano University in Bucharest where, at the invitation of Romania’s Social Democratic Party (PSD), Tony Blair recently spoke to an invited audience at the showpiece lecture theatre of the privately funded institution. I managed to get a ticket and took my seat with assorted journalists, university staff and the most senior figures in PSD, a group (or cabal) of ex-presidents and prime ministers who have largely shaped Romania since the end of communism. Only one of their number was missing, presumably because his recent corruption trial did not go in his favour and the party did not wish to embarrass Mr Blair.

Of course what was notable in Mr Blair’s presentation was his continued lack of understanding of, or even any interest in, the source of the power
that he so craves.

     The evening was given the title ‘The Future of Europe in the New Global Order’, but Mr Blair must be accepted as a member of Europe’s genuine political elite and can handle such a portentous speaking assignment.
     And then he is among us, tanned and smiling (that smile…), accompanied by PSD’s current young leader Victor Ponta, himself a lawyer. Mr Ponta introduces Mr Blair as one of the politicians that he most admires (more smiling) and then takes his seat in the audience, somewhat behind the past leaders of the party who seem only too happy to observe Romanian cultural requisites by shunning him.
     Mr Blair speaks for 40 minutes and apart from telling us once more how it falls to a few true leaders to take the necessary but difficult decisions, feeling the ‘hand of greatness’ on his shoulder, he spends a few moments dealing with the nub of the event’s central topic. It is that in the post-war years, the European project’s overriding objective was peace. Now, in the 21st century, the objective has changed and we must now focus on power; power in the new global order, power that can only be wielded by European states, in the face of growing competition from Asia and South America, if they work together. Yes ladies and gentlemen, power. Power, power and more power. That is what the EU is now for.
     The audience seemed to like this idea very much. Being Romanian, the last time they remember wielding any kind of international power was when they joined Nazi Germany to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 and that didn’t turn out very well. But here was Tony Blair telling them that they were now members of one of the world’s most powerful blocs, if only it could harness that power. Great stuff.
     Of course what was notable in Mr Blair’s presentation was his continued lack of understanding of, or even any interest in, the source of the power that he so craves. Consistent with his days as leader of the Labour Party and prime minister, Mr Blair did not waste one second talking about the people of Europe and how their voices might be heard, or how they might be effectively represented in his new European project.
     Mr Blair may be very highly regarded as a politician in some quarters and he certainly enjoys the acquisition and application of power; just ask my Serbian friends. However, he will never pass Politics 101 because of his failure to grasp the concept and the origins of sovereignty and he will never be regarded as a genuinely great leader because of his consequent inability to ‘take the people with him’. He did talk about giving the people what they want but that is not exactly the same thing if you don’t openly and honestly discuss the available options with them.
     Regardless of his international status and his many genuine achievements it remains true that the most interesting thing about a Tony Blair speech is what he doesn’t say, the things that are missing, the things he doesn’t want to tell us. This is why the ‘Third Way’ always seemed so half-baked and it is a symptom of the viral disease that has infected Europe’s political elite of late, a politics of continent-wide power held without accountability in which a project of integration and global projection is implemented without popular discussion. It is a project that will unravel simply because the elite of Europe have not bothered to build a genuine continental democratic structure through which they can communicate with the people.
     We should be grateful that Mr Blair failed to become president of the European Council under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, because he would have been considerably more effective in the role than Herman von Romuy. In spite of his most broadbrush approach to policy, Mr Blair has a very clear vision of our future. He just can’t be bothered to tell us what it is. Ask my Serbian friends.

Ronnie Smith was born in Largs and now lives in Romania, working as a professional training business consultant and communication coach. He is also a teacher of political science, a political and social commentator and a writer of fiction